The utilization of microfilm for the storage of large volumes of data has become increasingly required in recent years as the steadily increasing size of various industries, and especially the archival documentation including rare books and especially out of print documents.
The use of microfilm having images serially recorded thereon is limited in certain respects. The most significant limitation is the arduous task of accessing the microfilms. In addition, the amount of information which can be recorded is limited to the input microfilm format selected. Further, the storage of each microfilm reel requires sufficient physical space which may not be readily available for large users of microfilm.
In the field of microfilming, a microfiche is a single sheet of film containing sequences of microimages and is provided with a border area for titles, authors, names, classification data, etc., which can be read by the unaided eye. A microfiche is an ideal form for containing related images and is unsurpassed when compared to prior art systems of microfilming for economy, storage, ease of handling and print-out for images that represent many pages of a single report or books that are to be occasionally or rextensively reproduced for wide distribution. A microfiche may contain any number of images depending upon the size of the input document and the reduction ratio.
Microfiche is considered superior to microfilm reels in convenience of handling and copying. The accessability of photographic information on a microfiche also is distinctly superior to photographic information on reels.
Microfiche camera arrangements for converting a filmstrip into photographic frames on a fiche have been disclosed in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,682,546 discloses a fiche camera for exposing frames of a filmstrip which subsequently is converted to a matrix array of photographic frames on a fiche, the camera including a transport mechanism for advancing the film, a shutter for exposing the photographic frames of the filmstrip, and fiche coordinate counting means which is operated each time the shutter is operated. The fiche coordinate counting means counts the frames in each column of a fiche, the number of columns and the number of fiche in a reel of film in a cartridge.
Prior art fiche camera arrangements, as exemplified by the aforementioned patent, require a manual intervention step in order to form the microfiche. Since the demand for archivial material has recently increased dramatically any manual steps in the conversion of 35 mm microfilm to microfiche are undesirable.